Michigan Disability Resistance

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Pharmaceutical companies are developing new drugs in only two therapeutic areas these days -- cancer and rare diseases. Why? These are the only therapeutic areas where exorbitant pricing is tolerated by payers.

How exorbitant are we talking about? Most new drugs for cancer and rare diseases are being priced above $400,000 a year per patient. Some drugs are being priced at $1 million per treatment. And prices continue to soar.

Who loses from this pricing practice? You might think the patients with cancer or with rare diseases are most likely to suffer. But that isn't true.

To cover these exorbitant costs for even a small number of people, payers slash their expenditures in other therapeutic areas, and these cuts affect millions of people. For example, instead of agreeing to pay for the best treatment for diabetes for $1,500, payers approve the use of a second-rate treatment for $75. Physicians are not good at challenging payers, so most patients will get the second-rate treatment.

So the patients who lose the most are typically those who do not have cancer or rare diseases. Actually, nearly everyone else loses when a company prices a novel drug at extreme levels.

Last week, things took a turn for the worse.

According to an article by Tae Kim on CNBC, Goldman Sachs issued a report (by Salveen Richter) that suggested that drug developers might want to think twice about making drugs that were too effective. Richter's report, entitled "The Genome Revolution," was issued on April 10 and says:

"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

The translation: if you develop a new drug that cures people rapidly, then patients will not need to take the drug on an ongoing basis, and that limits the amount of money a company can make.

http://bit.ly/2HzjB7Z

A notoriously dangerous birth control device reveals the extent to which the medical establishment disbelieves women’s pain.

For years, women warned each other not to use Essure. The birth control device — which was restricted and given a rare “black box warning” last week by the FDA — has been linked to a plethora of health problems, from fatigue to chronic abdominal pain to death. The FDA has received more than 26,000 complaints and reports of eight adult deaths linked to the device. The device has broken and left metal shards embedded in patients’ uteri. It has caused pain so severe that one woman told NBC News she used to weep in her sleep.

For a long time, the only way to have a frank and informative discussion about any of this was to talk to other Essure patients or log into a self-created online support group, like Facebook’s Essure Problems. Doctors were aware of the potential side effects, but, the FDA found, they weren’t actually informing patients about them, outside of handing them a pamphlet.

Essure has been on the market since 2002. Despite years of women telling stories about the catastrophic side effects they’d experienced, and even petitioning to have it taken off the market entirely—something some women are still doing: “We don’t want this offered as an option to any woman,” Lisa Saenz, whose uterus was perforated by the device, told NBC—it has taken nearly 20 years for their voices to have an effect.

In the #MeToo era, the call to believe women has become ubiquitous. It’s used, quite rightfully, in the context of sexual assault and harassment, where our tendency to dismiss women’s accounts of the harm they’ve suffered can give active cover to rapists and harassers. But our tendency to dismiss female survivors springs from a broader cultural tendency to find women’s voices less credible and less authoritative than men’s. We don’t just disbelieve women about rape, we disbelieve them about everything, up to and including their own bodies.

In fact, women and the health care establishment have been at odds for much of recorded history. Essure is not the only or the first instance of doctors just plain refusing to believe women’s pain. Stereotypically feminine ailments, like fibromyalgia (whose sufferers are 80 to 90 percent female) have been dismissed as mass delusions. Experiences as universal as menstrual cramps and PMS were thought to be imaginary until recently (and PMS still has its skeptics). In 2018, doctors determined the pain of cramping could be “almost as bad as a heart attack,” yet physicians were still being taught that over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen “should be good enough.”

Even in emergency situations, women are routinely disbelieved.

https://cnb.cx/2JaLMqY

Taxes are due April 17, and while many Americans dread the coming deadline, filing could be a saving grace for others. That's because many people use their refunds to pay for key medical expenses they had otherwise been putting off.

The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed the out-of-pocket spending habits of 1.2 million Americans who received a refund in 2016 and found a "dramatic link between health care spending and tax refunds."

Those who filed earliest and received their refund in February put 64 percent of their spending response toward paying for deferred care. A smaller but still startling 55 percent of those who filed in the following months did the same.

In both groups, almost all of the remaining spending went to paying bills with service-providers, with a small fraction going toward drugs or other medical supplies that could be stockpiled, according to the data.

In the week after receiving a refund, the overall level of health care spending was 60 percent higher than in a typical week over the 100 days before. Out-of-pocket spending on debit cards increased 83 percent with no offsetting change to credit-card spending, "suggesting the cash infusion provided by the tax refund was a major factor driving changes in health-care spending behavior," the report notes.

And 62 percent of spending was paid in-person at health-care providers, which "means cash-flow dynamics influenced not just when consumers paid for health care but also when they received it."

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 A diabetic man who relies on a wheelchair claims Avalon Villa Care Center in Los Angeles removed him from the facility and dropped him off at homeless shelter downtown without insulin, according to CBS Los Angeles.

Ronald Anderson, 51, said the facility left him in front of the shelter, Union Rescue Mission, with only his wheelchair. Mr. Anderson told CBS Los Angeles he has insurance and lived at the center for the last 18 months. He said he doesn't know why he was taken to the shelter.

In a statement, Avalon Villa said it conducts all patient care, including discharges, in accordance with all laws and regulations, according to CBS Los Angeles.

"Avalon Village Care Center adheres to the highest level of ethics and morals and the care of our patients is our number one priority," Avalon Villa said.

Mr. Anderson told KABC he never signed discharge papers and asked Avalon Villa to help him get into another long-term care facility, but his request went ignored. A city attorney reportedly met with Mr. Anderson and homeless shelter staff regarding the incident. Union Rescue Mission officials told KABC they believe legal action will be taken against Avalon Villa.

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